(And the basis for a crappy TV movie with Tom Hanks.) The theory turned out to be false, but the story had legs, and it became the font of an entire chain of urban legends about similar incidents. In Michigan (where Freaks and Geeks is set and where I grew up), there was still the fresh memory of the James Dallas Egbert case in 1979, in which the disappearance of a troubled Michigan State University student was blamed on live re-enactments of D&D in the steam tunnels underneath the campus. This is 1981, remember, when D&D was relatively new and even more stigmatized than the mildly dorky associations it carries today. The best depiction of Dungeons and Dragons on TV came in these scenes from the finale episode of Freaks and Geeks, which among other things provided the handle for regular Tuned Inlander Carlos the Dwarf. But I couldn’t let the news go unnoted here, because far from being a hermetic obsession of antisocial geeks, D&D had a wide influence on pop culture, even, or especially, if you never hefted a dodecahedron. At first blush, this seems more like a Nerd World topic, and Lev Grossman doffs his +2 Cloak of Protection to Gygax over there. Follow and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax has died.
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